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About twenty more books
Dec. 6th, 2022 08:53 pm- Nettle and Bone by T. J. Kingfisher
I felt bad for liking this story (in the "dark fairy tale" genre) only as much as I did. It has a lot of interesting things going on it it - the most notable one is that the heroine ends up doing a lot of adventuring-party-building, including doing Three Tasks for the dust-wife, but instead of getting a Quest Reward Thingummy, the dust-wife comes with her because she obviously needs help. There are a lot of things that are just a little sidewise like that (especially the fairy godmothers), in an entertaining way. The heroine is shy and convent-raised and maybe I just wanted her to be more forceful, or clever, or something? I'm not sure why it didn't grab me as much as some of the author's other books; I might have to read it again to check, as a loyalist. Four stars.
- How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It and A Practical Guide to Conquering the World by K. J. Parker
Hmm. Very mixed feelings about these, the two sequels to Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City. I quite liked the first one for the combination of "engineering hackery" and commentary on colonialism and empire and supply chain logistics. The second one goes for the standard "actor must impersonate the ruler" comedy, lampshades it a couple of times, looks like it's going to be farce, and then there are heads on pikes all over the place. The third one is basically straight up antihero (well, it does say conquering the world instead of defending the city) and I'm deeply suspicious of the plausibility of the army combat mechanic. I was remarking to Marcus (midway through book two) that I was wondering if K. J. Parker was evolving back into Tom Holt as far as comedy I wasn't entirely fond of, but then the heads on pikes showed up, and in book three there is QUITE A LOT of explanation about how to make a sinew-backed bow and a rather horrible main character, so we were back to Parker again. I listened to these on audiobook, which meant I also have one of my traditional complaints (I have never heard a female narrator do such a bad job with men's voices as some male narrators do with weomn's voices. 'nasal harridan' in particular didn't fly for me as the Most Beautiful And Charismatic Actress in the World) and an entirely new variant of a standard complaint (pronunciation of names not being consistent between narrators) - but this time it was the same narrator and he wasn't consistent between the two books. They were recorded two years apart, but I listened to them back to back, so it was kind of jarring. The main character in book two, once he's in character, is Lysimachus, which was pronounced "Lissy Marcus". In book three, he's referred to as "Leesy Marcus", including by the character who is in both books. I did finish them, but by the end it was more like homework than fun. Three stars.
- The Embroidered Book (by Kate Heartfield)
I definitely bought this for the cover. I do that sometimes. This is an alternate history of the politics of late-1700s Europe, the main characters two of the daughters of Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria - both named Maria [othername] but they grew up into Charlotte, Queen of Naples, and Marie Antoinette after their mother married them off for alliances. Anyway, the interesting thing is the magic system, which both sisters secretly begin to practice, and the magic is woven all through the story, including explaining some of the weird real life things like the Diamond Necklace Scandal (in which Marie Antoinette did *not* buy a diamond necklace but it was a terrible scandal anyway). Also, the painter Angelica Kauffman was really good - why have I not heard of her before? Never mind, I can guess the answer. The magic system reminds me of the Unknown Armies magic system - everything is paid for in sacrifice, of objects and emotions and memories.
This is going to be a long quote, but it captures a lot of what got its hooks into me.
She opens the embroidered book. On the thirtieth page, there is the spell she needs, in her long-dead governess's patient and frilly handwriting:
For an item of clothing, reproducible and inexhaustible, to confer on the wearer persuasion of a listener's mind beyond the natural, these proofs have been found: convaincre &rarr oonvainore &rarr ooovaioore &rarr oooaaioore &rarr oooaaiooue. For the prime magister, these were the sacrifices corresponding to the letters of power, in sequence dextral: ooo, for the love, an affection, written; aa, for the body, clippings of all fingernails; i, for the hope, a passing fancy or appetite, written; oo, for the second love, a fondness, written; u, for the memory, one jape or trifle, written; and at the last, e, for the treasure, a clipped groat.
'It's mostly writing this time,' Charlotte murmurs. 'You have pen and paper? I brought the other things.'
The other things are a velvet coin-purse filled with her own fingernail clippings and a small copper coin, with the shield of Austria on one side and '1 HELLER 1765' on the other. She doesn't have a clipped groat, and she hopes this will do.
She goes now to Antoine's dressing table, where her sister has laid a few scraps of paper, an inkwell, and a quill. Charlotte has already decided on the hope: for chocolate cake tomorrow. A passing fancy or appetite. The memory, small as it is, is harder than she thought it would be: the people who used to tell jokes were Papa and Charles, and they are both dead, and she doesn't want to sacrifice her memories of them. Finally, she remembers the way her little brother Max dramatically lifted his coat-tails to sit down at dinner the other day, in imitation of a certain cousin. She smiles and writes that down.
The loves are difficult. For the fondness, she writes the name of Mops, Antoine's little pug. It's hard to imagine not being fond of Mops, with his perpetually confused face and delightful little ears. The affection is a little trickier, but ultimately she settles on Lerchenfeld, her new governess. She's been a good governess, even something like a friend.
Charlotte folds the papers, so that Antoine won't see what she's written. They do this to spare each other.
Into each point of the star, she puts her sacrifices, walking around twice clockwise so she can place them in order as they are in the spell.
Then Charlotte pulls the final item out of her pocket: the long white gloves with her monogram on them. Mama says it is a waste for the unmarried archduchesses to monogram anything; soon they will have new initials, once they're married. But Charlotte likes to mark the things that are hers.
She steps gingerly over the ash lines of the star, places the gloves in the middle, and steps back.
'I give these things,' she pronounces.
She takes a deep breath, pulls out a handkerchief and puts it to her nose. She can hear Antoine doing the same. But she smells nothing, sees nothing. Perhaps the sacrifices aren't worth enough. The coin is wrong, or the memory too trifling. Or they misunderstood the spell altogether. They've never tried this one before.
Then, small but real movement: the little pile of fingernail and toenail clippings darkens and shifts. The coin rusts and wears, going green and then bright orange and then brown. The bits of paper become ragged and thin and, as with every spell, there is a horrible moment when the words come off the paper, in a stream of ink that rises into the air as if someone were tugging on them. Little currents of dark ink in the air, dissipating, gone. The paper itself is a pile of brown threads, and the pile of nail trimmings is now a kind of sludge. Everything goes brown, eventually. The coin, the paper, the nails.
It's working.
Charlotte watches it all with her usual fascination. It distracts from the fact that she is losing things, including some she will not remember. No matter how small, these losses are deaths, unnaturally hastened. They have given death more than its due. But now she is fifteen, and she has need of important magic.
There it is at last: the smell of decay and death. They hold their handkerchiefs tightly to their faces, but the smell fills Charlotte's nostrils anyway.
The coin lasts the longest. For several minutes, the pile of brown dust remains, smaller and smaller, until a breath of unseen wind takes it. The items in the points of the star are gone, as if they never were. She doesn't care what they eat for dessert tomorrow, and Lerchenfeld is just an old sycophant in a bonnet. She glances at the pink-lined basket where Mops is snoring gently, disgustingly.
As for the memory, it was there - a moment ago - but it is gone. She can see her hand setting down the words, but her mind's eye can't make sense of what she wrote. Her breath catches - it always comes with a lurch, this loss of memory - but she is fairly sure that it was nothing of any importance, this time.
So much of the emotional narrative is tied into this sort of sacrifice - pruning away what you think you can bear to lose, and then forgetting it when it's gone, and trying to be the same person afterwards. There's a particularly wrenching bit most of the way through, where Charlotte needs needs needs a particular piece of magic, but she doesn't have enough hope left to pay the sacrifice of hope. A friend is dying, and she goes to ask him for a final terrible favor - he's a happy, good person, and she asks him to sacrifice his hope for a better world, at the end. He does. But then he lives.
There's more I could go into, but I just had a page of quotation which I think catches the poetic melancholy better than I could describe. Four and a half stars.
- Spelunking through Hell (by Seanan McGuire)
This is book eleven in the InCryptid series. I've really forgotten how everyone is related to everyone else by this point. Still moderately fun popcorn, though this one, like the last one, spends pretty much the whole time not on Earth; the cryptids are the fun part, so let's get back to them.
- Those Across the River (by Christopher Buehlman)
I really liked The Blacktongue Thief (last set of books) and I also really liked The Necromancer's House a number of years ago. So I thought I'd go look for some more of this author. (I also read The Suicide Motor Club which was fun popcorn). This was his first book, set in the Depression in a little Southern town with a serious horror problem. So, the atmosphere is about 30% racism, 10% more sex than I needed to read about, and 60% seriously atmospheric creepiness, until you actually find out the details of the horror, which is kind of a letdown. Anyway, there are some bits that are amazingly creepy, and some bits that are just middling. But it was his first book, and like a puppy with big paws, shows a lot of potential. Three and a half stars.
- Eyes of the Void (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)
Part two of the Final Architecture trilogy, after Shards of Earth. It does suffer a lot from middle book syndrome - there isn't nearly as much wild and new as the first book, and it doesn't manage to conclude anything as much as I'd like. And Idris spends way too much time in a cycle of understanding yet one more epiphany about unspace (This One For Sure).
- Battle of the Linguist Mages (by Scotto Moore)
This was very eccentric. Charles Stross called it a dance off between Snow Crash and Gideon the Ninth, and there's Snow Crash all over it, but I'm not sure about Gideon. Amazon's quick summary is: "Isobel is the Queen of the medieval rave-themed VR game Sparkle Dungeon. Her prowess in the game makes her an ideal candidate to learn the secrets of "power morphemes" - unnaturally dense units of meaning that warp perception when skilfully pronounced." As it turns out, neither sparkles nor raves is really my genre (and they are really pretty antipodal to goth necromancers), but the idea of punctuation marks having been an alien species that colonized our minds was kind of intriguing. As a side note, I think this is the first SF/fantasy book I've read that dealt with people's pronouns not as a solved social protocol, but as a work in progress like it is now - there's a lot of mini-asides when meeting new characters about how the protagonist gets their pronouns (from the introduction, or by looking them up on line, or whatever). It's a pretty wild ride, a lot like Snow Crash was, but I'm too grey and old for sparkle raves. Three stars.
- Tuyo, Nikoles, Tarashana, Keraunani, Suelen (by Rachel Neumeier)
(There is a sixth book that I haven't read yet). I click on the occasional Kindle Unlimited book; mostly they are fine, but I quite liked Tuyo, enough to get hooked on the series. It's a YA fantasy world with the summer country and the winter country and the culture clash between them. Not just the cold north and the hot south, but with extra magic applied. Ryo (a young man from the winter country) is left as a sacrificial tuyo as his clan retreats from the summer country's army. If the foe accepts the sacrifice, then they get to do whatever they want to him, but any revenge / hard feelings / extra vengeance has to be taken out on the tuyo rather than further war. Lord Aras, the summer commander, accepts the sacrifice but says "whatever I want, is you have to be my translator." The world building is fun, the two cultures both seem interestly complicated, and the clash between the two is nuanced and neither side is the Bad Guys. There is the occasional actual bad guy; they tend to be more over the top "I am bad because muah hah hah" than I'd prefer, but it's okay. The angst is pretty angsty. Anyway, generally four stars for the series.
- A Half-Built Garden (by Ruthanna Emrys)
This was a lovely solarpunk first contact. The world is clawing its way back from climate apocalypse mostly due to the rise of watershed networks (one per watershed) that coordinate via a sort of AI crowdshared decision making. The main political factions are the watershed networks, the global corporations (based out of offshore techtopias), and the national governments. Then aliens arrive! The aliens want to get humanity off of its "obviously dying" planet and out into the solar system.
- Watershed Networks: "But we were just starting to turn things around! If everyone gives up on the planet now, it's back to doomed!"
- Corporations: "A system full of resources and new ability to harvest it all? Count us in!"
- Nation-states: "Wait - is NASA finally relevant again? We have authority here!"
Redbug poked their head out of the tent. "Are you folks seeing this?"
Five stars.
"Everyone's seeing this," said Mendez. "Any word on a fix? Or a cause?"
"I'm on call this week for debugging malware." They ducked their head. "I'm supposed to organize---but there hasn't been an event this extreme in decades. I can't work from here. And I can't work from home---my household has text, but the whole neighborhood's out of power."
"Wait," said Rhamnetin. "Your communications are out so you lost power? Do you need us to send shuttles?"
Ytterbium shoved him, knee against knee. "It's a planet, you moron. Their life support's fine."- A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (by Becky Chambers)
A sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built. It's a circle round the same thoughts and lessons as the first one, so it didn't hit me with as much of a surprise wallop as the first story did, but I find it kind of hard to review coherently because as of this writing (but not the reading), I'm on medical leave from work due to surgery recovery, and am really having to struggle with the question of "who am I if not the person doing the worthwhile job that I'm good at?" in a way that I haven't hard to think about since quitting MIT (well, or seeing Encanto; "Surface Pressure" punches pretty hard there too, though in a different way.). I think all I can really say here is, it's a worthwhile sequel. :)
- Nona the Ninth (by Tamsyn Muir)
I'm pretty sure nobody needs me to tell them about this book to decide whether or not to read it. I didn't love it as hard as Gideon but more than Harrow - Harrow is probably the most accomplished, but I don't enjoy really broken narrators enough. Nona finally gives us some backstory on how we got from Earth to Everything Is Necromancers; it's huge exposition dumps but I appreciated it. Nona is really the first book that's set in an actual societyinstead of a setting with Named and Numbered characters. There are crowds. There is a school, with a feral pack of kids that is oddly reminiscent of the Them from Good Omens. Also, good heavens is each book in the series a different genre. Four and a half stars? I don't think anything will be able to top the sheer head-exploding exhilaration of Gideon.
- Of Mycelium and Men (by William C Tracy)
(Honestly, I think this book was written to fit the title.) Start with a generation ship - the crew is zero-G adapted and moderately short-lived. The admins are genetically modified to be long-lived, and are mostly in cryosleep. The third group are the soldiers, much more genetically modified. The ship is running out of theoretically hospitible planets to land on, so the admins make the decision to land on this one, before determining that the local ecology is pretty much all one huge fungal super-powerful biomass. There are lots of skips forward in time, so we get many decades of battling the planet to try to survive. The premise isn't bad, but the reawakened admins are just such assholes about everything that it's implausible. "This was originally the admin lounge. Doesn't matter that it was repurposed a thousand years ago, we're having the police clear the current inhabitants out because it's an admin lounge." And playing politics against the other admins is more important than actual, y'know, survival. I did want to see how it turned out, but too many subplots trail off or get executed by the secret police, and if there's an ending it's going to need to be in the sequel. Two stars.
- Station Eternity (by Mur Lafferty)
What if everyone started thinking Jessica Fletcher was a serial killer because she discovers so many murders, and she started getting investigated by the FBI about it, and then she ran off to an alien space station so she wouldn't be around humans? A bit of a twist at the end there. I found this interesting and fun to follow along, but not quite solid. I think I had a similar reaction to Six Wakes by the same author - the premise is intriguing, but it's like a TV showith a solid pilot that didn't quite plan out the entire season.
- Cage of Souls (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)
This is different than the other books of his that I've read. It's very... jungle river. I wonder if it would remind me of Apocalypse Now or Jungle Queen if I had seen either of those. We've got multiple mini-dystopias in the same place - the Cage, which is the downriver floating jungle prison ruled by the tyrannical Marshal and the detached Governor. It's downriver of the city of Shadrapar, the last city on the dying Earth. Shadrapar has its own dystopic tyrant issues, and so does the Underworld (physically underneath as well as criminal). The story is very atmospheric, dank and fetid and swampy, lit by the dying sun, just... generally oppressive in all the directions at once. I didn't see how it could possibly end happily, and it mostly doesn't, but I was still compelled to keep reading. Also, I loved this little throwaway reference to Hunting of the Snark:
Jon's shelter turned out to contain a case of chemicals of dubious provenance, a working machine which could extract pure samples of such chemicals and several ancient personal effects, which were all good merchandise on the jewellery and cosmetic market. In addition there was an astonishingly fragile manuscript in one of the known ancient languages which was worth more than the rest put together and bought us both our scholarships to the Academy. It was in the form of an ancient parable concerning quests with terrible ends undertaken by the unprepared, and it included in it the haunting refrain, "What I tell you three times is true."
There is a giant spider (kind of), but it's a person who has been turned into one. So I guess it's not completely outside the Tchaikovsky ballpark. :) Four stars.
More book reports!
Apr. 24th, 2022 11:03 am- The Blacktongue Thief (by Christopher Buehlman)
This is apparently Book One of a trilogy, but it stands alone reasonably well. The story arc isn't a Hero's Journey mountain shape - it's more like a bunch of medium sized hills - and the book ends after one of the larger hills. So it's a pretty good stopping place, but obviously also there could be a lot more in the long haul. All that is to say, it won't annoy you by leaving you on a cliffhanger. I listened to this on audiobook, and I really enjoyed it. It's narrated by the author, and, unusually, he does Voices, rather than Standard Storyteller Narrative. Apparently Buehlman's original day job was a Professional Insulter at renfaires, so he has some actor chops too. Also, the audio production actually got people to set the songs to melody and someone to sing them properly, which is the first time I've heard that and it impressed me.
Yes, Laura, but what is the book about? says imaginary Andrea in my head. Fair question. The war wih the goblins is mostly over - the peace is barely holding, only because everyone is willing to look the other way when there's a one-off massacre. But now the giants have come over the mountains off in the hinterlands, and a thief gets assigned by his guild to go along with a warrior and a witch to see what's going on. The guild has ulterior motives, of course. So do the warrior and the witch. Nobody's fooling anyone along those lines. So the basic story, once the band gets together, is a traveling adventure story, with a lot of unpleasant mishaps. The genre would be grimdark, except that it's bloodspatteredly funny. Here's an excerpt as the thief invites himself along with the warrior:
"Are you going to Oustrim?" I asked the Spanth.
This was at the inn I had tracked her to, the Roan Horse, a handsome old wooden firetrap much loved by travelers keen to spare their purses. I was sitting in a chair by the Spanth's bed when I spoke, and it really wasn't a fair question, considering she was sleeping.
Quick as summer lightning, she caught me up by the heel and dangled me upside down out of the window I had opened. What she didn't know was that I hadn't spoken until I was ready to wake her [...]
[Skipping a page of digression into coinage from when he searched the room first. Not that it wasn't entertaining.]
"Are you bound for Oustrim?" I said again. "And where'd the bird go?"
"Shut up about the bird."
"Fine. What's your name, then?"
"You don't need to know it."
"All right. But are you going to Oustrim?"
"You're a Guild thief. You have training and magic. If I drop you, it won't hurt you, will it?"
"If I say no, will you think of a different way to hurt me?"
"Maybe."
"Then yes, it will hurt me very much. Please, brave knight, do not drop me on my melon."
She dropped me, but I don't hold that against her.
We were only on the third floor.Anyway, I thought this was adorable (and the relationship between Kinch (the thief) and Galva (the Spanth warrior) keeps on pretty much in that vein). But also, having added this, I can use it to segue into the world-building. The story is thick with details. The Roan Horse, the name of the inn, has an extra kick of tragedy - horses were wiped out by a magical plague in the goblin wars, and the Spanth in particular, a country of cavalry riders, are shattered by the loss. There's a brief scene later in the book where the party crosses paths with a baroness who has one of the last horses, elderly and mostly ceremonial, and it made me mourn our lost beloved horses. The Guild training & magic is taught at Guild schools, which are costly. (Some are straw schools, and don't teach you very well, but are still costly). Most of the Guild is in debt from their student loans. Kinch, who is still badly in debt, has a Guild debtor's tattoo on one cheek. It's magic, so it can only be seen in firelight, and on any given night, the first person in an inn who claims it can hit him and get a free drink (paid for by the Guild). That's what the Guild is like; Kinch is going on this mission to clear his debt.
There's a lot more detail - little cultural bits from the countries the story goes through, weird spooky witches and wizards that borrow a lot from Buehlman's horror background. And a lot of bloody fights (and a terrifying kraken attack). It's a grimdark world, but the characters aren't ground down - they have hope, and grudging comradeship, and even love. Five stars.
- Deeplight (by Frances Hardinge)
Another one not solidly in the middle of a genre. Deeplight is sea-monster horror sliding sideways over into steampunk fantasy. I also really liked this (okay, I have a soft spot for sea monster horror since Lovecraft and Subnautica), though it does look for a long time like it's going to be one of those stories where if the protagonist had just not gotten up in the morning, things would have been better. (It is not, but we don't learn that until pretty late in the story.) So what is this one about? Hark is a mid-teenage urchin on a dead-god-haunted island. Like many fictional teenage urchins, Hark has a stronger braver badder recklesser friend, who drags him into trouble and is the impetus of most of the plot. Let's just say things go wrong, and then they go more wrong, and then they go on from there. A nice inclusion: the "sea-kissed" are divers who are deaf in one or both ears. Because divers (for bits of the dead gods) are one of the big sources of wealth and power, being sea-kissed is high-status in island society. Everyone with any social climbing skill knows at least some sign language.
This description of the (now-dead) gods is what hooked me in the preview into buying the book:The gods were as real as the coastlines and currents and as merciless as the winds and whirlpools. The Glass Cardinal throttled galleons with translucent tendrils. The Red Forlorn floated like a cloud of blood in the water. Kalmaddoth howled with a razor lattice instead of a mouth. Dolor lurched through the water, kicking with dozens of human legs. The Hidden Lady waited in the silent deeps, shrouded by her own snaking hair. Now and then, one would rise from the Undersea and appear in the pale light of day, devouring schooners, smashing ports to splinters, and etching their shapes into the nightmares of all. Some of them sang as they did so.
But I also highlighted this bit, because I liked it a lot:A few hours later, the pair of them were hiding on the hillside watching the dusk draw in. Jelt didn't get nerves when he was about night business. Hark did, though he knew better than to admit it. He dealt with it by telling himself a story. He watched himself as if he'd already done it, already survived, and was telling the tale of his adventure to an agog and adoring audience in a tavern afterward. It calmed him down and slowed his pulse a little. He was the hero, and everything was going to be all right. It already was all right. The things happening right now weren't real peril; they were just drama.
Four and a half stars.- The Bone Orchard (by Sara Mueller)
Charm is the madam of a very strange brothel, and the mistress of the Emperor. The Emperor dies and the rest of his family are psychotic sadists. Politics follows. The strangeness of the brothel is that Charm grows everyone in vats from bone-trees in the garden, and their personalities are psychically split-off portions of herself in kind of self-induced dissociative identity disorder. I think that about covers it. It's really gothic. Anyway - it was interesting enough that I kept reading it, but there was something of a shortage of sympathetic characters. Maybe just on average, because all the princelings are pretty seriously awful. Three stars?
- The Hands of the Emperor and The Return of Fitzroy Angursell (by Victoria Goddard)
These are set in the same Nine Worlds setting as the Stargazey Pie series I talked about last time, but are quite different. I adored the first book. The back-cover description is:
An impulsive word can start a war.
A timely word can stop one.
A simple act of friendship can change the course of history. Cliopher Mdang is the personal secretary of the Last Emperor of Astandalas, the Lord of Rising Stars, the Lord Magus of Zunidh, the Sun-on-Earth, the god.
He has spent more time with the Emperor of Astandalas than any other person.
He has never once touched his lord.
He has never called him by name.
He has never initiated a conversation. One day Cliopher invites the Sun-on-Earth home to the proverbially remote Vangavaye-ve for a holiday. The mere invitation could have seen Cliopher executed for blasphemy.
The acceptance upends the world.So... I thought I knew what it was going to be about. And it was, for about the first third. Cliopher is the awesomely competent bureaucrat and Decent Guy. The Emperor is busy Emperoring, and Cliopher is working behind the scenes to get things passed like UBI and good public transportation. I kind of expected that it would be partly about teaching the Emperor to see the humanity "below" him (with Cliopher as the worst Manic Pixie Dream Girl ever) but it wasn't nearly that facile. The Emperor is not Mr. Darcy. He's more complex and more human already at the beginning, we just don't get to see it. But anyway, that's just the first part. There's a whole second arc about colonialism and "civilized" meaning "my culture not yours" and an amazing victory that Cliopher can really only get away with by virtue of having the Emperor on his team; simply being in the right would have been insufficient. And there's a third arc kind of mixed with the second arc about Cliopher's estrangement from his family, that... well, it's where all the angst and drama is, and I think there are a few too many go-rounds of 'his family doesn't understand' (for example, imagine your parents being disappointed that you were "only" a secretary, when you were the Secretary of State). The initial misunderstanding, sure. But to persist in the misunderstanding after some of the events of the book is... implausible. But after that last series, I really should have expected something to turn the angst up to 11.
The second book is more different, and too much detail would spoil the first book. But I will say, there's a detour into the one of the other Worlds, and they meet a lot of the Stargazey characters, so if you haven't read those, they will come out of nowhere. Hands of the Emperor stands on its own (though it was nice to have gotten a sense for what the fall of Astandalas meant beforehand), but Return of Fitzroy Angursell might want more backstory. I was kind of disappointed because I wanted Hands Of The Emperor Part Two and it really wasn't, but that's not the book's fault. Four and a half stars for the first; I'm going to recuse myself from giving stars to the second.
- The Kaiju Preservation Society (by John Scalzi)
This is Scalzi's lighthearted pandemic-and-Trump escape book. It's a fine example of that. Also, in the way that The Good Fight was the first explicitly Trump-era TV I saw, this is probably the first set-in-pandemic-era book I've read (because I read SFF rather than contemporary fiction or non-fiction). This is the second time I haven't noticed that I didn't know the gender of the protagonist until I saw someone mention it later. But it isn't *just* that I assume everyone is male! I've had books where I was startled to discover multiple chapters in that the protagonist was male, too. It's more that everyone in Scalzi's books has a very similar voice, and to me they all skew kind of male. But also, yeah, I have a lot of defaults I'm blind to.
- A Study in Honor and The Hound of Justice (by Claire O'Dell)
After writing the above, I was racking my brain because I knew I had read a post-Trump SF book recently. Kindle is proving to be an unreliable tool for ordering what I have read. These recast Holmes and Watson as Black women in a semi-near future with a civil war on with white supremacist insurrectionists. They certainly aren't comfortable escapism. The recasting was interesting; at first I thought the characters were really not much like the originals, but how could they be? Instead they were more like, extracting out a number of characteristics from the original (Watson as the wounded veteran doctor who can't afford an apartment; Holmes as the high-handed rich aloof investigator with a controlled drug habit) and uses them as the seed crystals for entirely new people. Who would a female Black combat veteran doctor in a near future setting be? What would she have had to deal with all her life? This Watson. Anyway, these are quite good, but definitely *not* lighthearted Trump escape.
- The Billiard Room Mystery (by Brian Flynn)
Some random thread of the Internet led me to classicmystery.blog, "Spoiler-Free Reviews of Fair Play Detective Fiction". The author of this blog has made it a goal to get all 50 of Flynn's novels republished, and has succeeded - good for him! Flyn was a Golden Age detective author who was mostly forgotten. This was Flynn's first book, and it was entirely reasonable as a air play puzzle mystery, set a hundred years ago in a British country manor. I may read more. But it's a niche. (I am now boggling at the timing. You know, those things like "Cleopatra lived closer to the building of the first Pizza Hut than the building of the pyramids". The first Poirot novel was set in 1916. The last Sherlock Holmes story was set in 1914. Yet somehow I thik of Holmes as from an earlier time, and all of those British country manor houses as just a generation ago. Stuff gets stuck in your head when you're a kid; I'm pretty sure I knew Dickens and Doyle and Austen were "long ago authors" but I thought Christie and the like were just writing about what it was like in England, which was different than California and had, well, lots of lords in manor houses. Maybe it's just whether or not motorcars are in genre. :)
- The Merchant's House (by Kate Ellis)
I think what brought me to classicmystery.blog was in fact searching for a new mystery series author. I might stick with this one. The genre seems to be the unearthing of a parallel historic mystery (in this case in an archaeological dig) that goes along with the modern mystery. I was initially dubious - would this be like Nancy Drew where whenever Dad had a case it was secretly tied in? But the cases aren't tied together, they just have similar motifs. That's more reasonable - and I think all mystery series need to have a Thing that makes them different, whether that be that crossword puzzles or antique etchings are relevant to all the plots or that the detective is actually themselves a mystery novelist, or a dog, so this is comparatively tame.
Belated Books
Jul. 4th, 2021 09:02 pmI kind of think I'm not holding up my end of the social contract by posting here without remembering to read other people's posts? but I guess that's also definitionally what blogging is, and I don't have anywhere else that I can usefully share book reviews. :)
( The 7 1/2 deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Rivers of London series
Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, A Declaration of the
Rights of Magicians, The Expert System's Brother / The Expert System's
Champion, Paladin's Strength, The Witness for the Dead, The Magnus
Archive, Agatha Christie's Poirot )
- Sisters of the Vast Black (by Lisa Rather)
- An interesting, thoughtful story about a very small nunnery aboard a living spaceship in a very large universe. It managers to touch on gender politics and colonialism politics and choices of faith and a lot of things, without using a very big hammer for any of them, and it reminded me a bit of the Long Journey to a Small Angry Planet books too. Four and a half light but deep stars.
- A Deadly Education> (by Naomi Novik)
- In order to enjoy this book, you have to accept the premise - Magical School for Magical Kids, but malevolent - as a given. But from that starting point, it's quite entertaining. The main character, El, is cranky/snarky almost to the point of anti-hero, but with enough self-aware irony to keep it amusing. The pecking-order sort of civilization that a magical high school with no grownups would evolve is an interesting civilization to poke in, and the quasi-sentient malevolent monster-haunted Scholomance is a fascinating setting. The book starts out fairly actiony and keeps going at a good clip. After the introduction is through, we get some more world-building about the larger magical-and-mundanes culture, the privileged and the less so, and that's done pretty well. El is certainly bitter about the huge gap between the haves and haves-not, but she's not wrong. During the exposition, I started thinking a little bit about the premise ("Okay, so it has to be this way because of these reasons. But why wouldn't they have... done this other thing?") and maybe it doesn't hold up, so never mind that - Malevolent Hogwarts, turned up to elevent - just roll with it. The pacing keeps escalating, there's a lovely moment of tense temptation in the middle, after it has done the work to make the stakes real. The one caveat - this is the first of two. Book one is junior year and book two is presumably senior year, so there's a reasonable stopping point, but it isn't a true ending. Four stars and one monster disguised as a star.
- Spellbreaker (by Charlie N Holmburg)
Another book one of two! Nice cover, though I kept wanting it to have subtle differences between the top side and the bottom side. Not a bad analogy for the book as a whole - nice, but I kept wanting a little more subtlety that wasn't there. Interesting and evocative magic system, feisty heroine, slightly too obvious Big Plot Twist. A number of nice little bits - here's one I highlighted. Elsie is an apprentice with not a ton of her own time, which makes pursuing her own plot difficult. For one side quest, she has to be gone for several days; the deuteragonist sends an invitation to a low-cost sponsored bookkeeping seminar, which is attractive enough for her boss to send her. But then she has to come up with an explanation of why she doesn't come back with any new skills.
She'd already rehearsed her words in the cab, so they flowed from her lips as easily as if they were true. "It was rather dreadful, honestly. Everyone invited was in a position similar to mine, including a few secretaries. But they treated us like a bunch of ninnies, like we barely knew how to read, let alone put our shoes on the right foot. I didn't learn much of anything." She sighed. "I'm glad to be home." That much, at least, was sincere.
Seeing it afterwards, it's not that awesome a quote, but at the time it made me smile - both the original pretext for leaving, and the excuse after, are sufficiently clever to the purpose. Anyway, I'll probably get the second one, but I'm looking forward to the sequel to Deadly Education more. Three stars.- Piranesi (by Susanna Clarke)
- This was a wonder. I don't want to explain the plot too much because the unfolding is part of the magic. I listened to this on audiobook, and I think that added to the experience, because it enforced a slow, dreamlike pacing. Here is how the book begins.
The story takes place in the House, full (as you can infer from the above) of Halls. I spent the entire book with an extraordinarily clear visual sense of the place, as familiar yet unfamiliar as a dream when you're dreaming it. After a while in which nothing much was happening, I wondered if it was going to be a book in which things happened - and I decided I didn't mind if it wasn't, it was interesting and strangely compelling anyway. But then some things happened, and some more things were learned from reading some journals, and some more things were learned for other reasons. I'm having a hard time putting into words what drew me in so strongly - but the isolation of pandemic is probably a lot of it. The House is the World, to Piranesi. He is alone, isolated, but in a place that is the entirety of the (small) world. Only one other person is in the House, and that's all the people there are in the world. There's the sea, and the sky, and the statues, and the albatross.... Anyway. It wasn't fun (nor was it not-fun), or exciting, or, a lot of other things I read books for. But it felt like breathing outside air after being inside for a long time, and the House is still in my head if I close my eyes. Five stars for me; I am really not sure how other people would like it.ENTRY FOR THE FIRST DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS
When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of three Tides. This is something that happens only once every eight years.
The Ninth Vestibule is remarkable for the three great Staircases it contains. Its Walls are lined with marble Statues, hundreds upon hundreds of them, Tier upon Tier, rising into the distant heights.
I climbed up the Western Wall until I reached the Statue of a Woman carrying a Beehive, fifteen metres above the Pavement. The Woman is two or three times my own height and the Beehive is covered with marble Bees the size of my thumb. One Bee - this always gives me a slight sensation of queasiness - crawls over her left Eye. I squeezed myself into the Woman's Niche and waited until I heard the Tides roaring in the Lower Halls and felt the Walls vibrating with the force of what was about to happen.
First came the Tide from the Far Eastern Halls. This Tide ascended the easternmost Staircase without violence. It had no colour to speak of and its Waters were no more than ankle deep. It spread a grey mirror across the Pavement, the surface of which was marbled with streaks of milky Foam.
Next came the Tide from the Western Halls. This Tide thundered up the westernmost Staircase and hit the Eastern Wall with a great Clap, making all the Statues tremble. Its Foam was the white of old fishbones, and its churning depths were pewter. Within seconds its Waters were as high as the Waists of the First Tier of Statues.
Last came the Tide from the Northern Halls. It hurled itself up the middle Staircase, filling the Vestibule with an explosion of glittering, ice-white Foam. I was drenched and blinded. When I could see again Waters were cascading down the Statues. It was then that I realised I had made a mistake in calculating the volumes of the Second and Third Tides.
A towering Peak of Water swept up to where I crouched. A great Hand of Water reached out to pluck me from the Wall. I flung my arms around the Legs of the Woman carrying a Beehive and prayed to the House to protect me. The Waters covered me and for a moment I was surrounded by the strange silence that comes when the Sea sweeps over you and drowns its own sounds. I thought that I was going to die; or else that I would be swept away to Unknown Halls, far from the rush and thrum of Familiar Tides. I clung on.
Then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over. The Joined Tides swept on into the surrounding Halls. I heard the thunder and crack as the Tides struck the Walls. The Waters in the Ninth Vestibule sank rapidly down until they barely covered the Plinths of the First Tier of Statues.
I realised that I was holding on to something. I opened my hand and found a marble Finger from some Faraway Statue that the Tides had placed there.
The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
- The Hollow Places (by T Kingfisher)
- What an odd niche to have started to write in - horror novels adjacent to classic horror stories by someone else. Or - not adjacent to, more like the novels are pearls around the grain of sand of the older story. The grain of sand is integral, but the pearl is better to read, to my modern reader brain. The Twisted Ones weaves The White People (Arthur Machen, 1904) through itself, and The Hollow Places visits the places of The Willows (Algernon Blackwood, 1907). The seams in this book are less obvious (though presumably they would be a lot more obvious had I read the original story first), but there isn't a manuscript being quoted here. The Hollow Places is scary, but it doesn't have any of the super-terrifying moments, due to the setting - scary things in another world are always easier to keep at a distance than scary things outside the window. So this is scary more along the lines of one of the Peter Cline stories where it turns out your townhouse has a wardrobe to Cthulhu Narnia in it. Four and a half stars.
- the Inspector Hannasyde mysteries, by Georgette Heyer
- I listened to all of these on audiobook also - Heyer is one of my comfort-read authors, and she's much more well known for her romances than her murders. These are all romances too, with a lot of the Heyer stock characters - but I enjoy her stock characters, and it also means she doesn't cheat the way Christie does by having the murderer only show their true character at the end. Well... I have always thought of that as a cheat, but I suppose that way lies the fallacy of "He can't be a rapist, he was always charming to *me*." But I don't really mean unrealistic, I mean in the enough-clues-to-solve-the-puzzle way, and "consistent characterization" is not actually one of the rules. But anyway, these four books are generally fun and banter-filled. Hannasyde himself isn't all that interesting as a detective, but his sergeant is great and the pair of them are a fun team. The fourth book, though - [SPOILERS AFTER THIS]. There are a lot of conventions in mystery novels, especially Golden Age mysteries and cozies. One of them is that the police, or the detective, or whoever, has the goal to find the true murderer, rather than win the police mechanic with an arrest and a conviction. (Tana French is my go-to example for Not That, but she is of course modern and not Golden Age). Here, the murderer is the local policeman who "finds the body". And my goodness, once the Inspector starts drawing up difficult timetables, it becomes really obvious. There are proper subtle clues inserted to point the way as well, but basically the culprit is protected by the convention that the policeman is the Good Guy to make it a surprise at the end. And it's not nearly as fun to be reading a book thinking that the clever inspector is being an absolute idiot.
- Cocaine Blues (by Kerry Greenwood)
- I'm starting to re-watch Miss Fisher's Muder Mysteries, and thought I would see what the books were like. This is the story the first episode is based on, and you can see that it's a pretty close adaptation, and equally fun. Watching the episode and then reading the novel makes it not the most puzzling mystery, though. On the other hand, these aren't puzzle-boxes, these are fun investigations with an awesome main character and gorgeous clothes. :)
A Whole Lot Of Mysteries
May. 30th, 2019 10:32 pmSo, on to the next.
The culture that I consumed growing up led me wrong in a number of ways. A lot of them are the unfortunate biases and -isms that I can't completely eradicate, but another is an inappropriate belief that while American society is in the present, British society is still full of aristocrats in country estates with servants at hand. Mysteries in particular like to inhabit the past, because the present (in particular, cell phones!) break a lot of plots and plot twists, but these inhabit a farther ago past - the first of Marsh's novels was published in 1934. Marsh's detective is a Scotland Yard Londoner, but Marsh was from New Zealand, and several of the book take place there. The fact that the technology and the social setting is nearly a century outdated slips by me like water, but the casual patronizing racism (in particular, the Maori are other, if not less) is a lot more jarring now than it was when I first read it. Progress in my -isms, I guess.
Some other random notes - in general, I found them fun. (I mean, I listened to all thirty-two, so I must have). There are a couple of plots that hinge on drug traffic, and I found them more boring than the others - partly because impersonal greed is less interesting as a motive, but partly because they go in a weird sixties anti-drug vibe direction that was hilariously dated. I just can't take "pad" seriously. It's definitely odd that 1930s Britain is "another time and place" and 1960s anti-drug homilies are "hilariously dated" - but avocado shag rugs are also hilariously dated and old hardwood furniture is antique, so there it is.
Also badly jarring (but, alas, not so outdated) is the appalling, continuously appalling, desription of a couple of fat characters. It only came up in a couple of books, or I probably would have had to give up, but there are several characters who are somewhat overweight. They are described as vast, elephantine, grotesque - and they tend to be referred to that way pretty much every time they are mentioned. It isn't always the case that fat = bad - two are bad guys, one is a classic battle-axe dowager - but like the Maori, they were never permitted to be normal people. (I say "somewhat overweight" because one of them is estimated as weighing sixteen stone, which I looked up and is 224 pounds American. Not that it would be more okay if they weighed more, but it made me take the adjectives far more personally than I did the racial ones.)
One of my pet peeves about audiobook production is when different narrators pronounce names differently. I wish the producers would use a pronunciation guide. (When it's a different producer, that's a different story, but it's all one publisher, and while the two main narrators correctly pronounce the character's name as "Allen", a couple of others say something much more like "Elaine".
- I do remember, when reading them the first time, that I was frustrated by how much I as the reader was expected to understand French. Other books use French as a seasoning - Hercule Poirot will call people "mon ami" and the reader is expected to understand what that means. Sayers will just drop in "Ah, mon Dieu, ça c'est plus difficile. Monsieur sait que les jours se suivent et se ressemblent. Voyons." And I can get through "Ah, mon Dieu" without help, but the rest is a blur. When I decided to revisit these, I thought "Oh, but now I have Google Translate." Unfortunately, French is not a language that lends itself to a non-speaker knowing how to spell it. (Looking through the Project Gutenberg transcript of Clouds of Witness to get that French sentence, I note that there is an entire letter in French, then translated in the text, that the audiobook is kind enough to not read in its French entirety, because I might have given up on the spot.
- There's more trial scenes than in many of the previous authors' works. If the detective is an official policeman, like Dalgleish or Alleyn, then they're doing the initial trying-to-find-the-killer. Amateurs like Wimsey (even when they're hanging out with Scotland Yard friends) more easily venture into defending the arrested innocent.
- Unfortunately, this series is insufficiently populated in the audiobook. I was okay skipping The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club because apparently nothing other than the mystery happens in it, but I can't bring myself to skip anything with Harriet, because she's the best thing in them, and felt it would be vaguely unsatisfying to read them in text instead.
- I hadn't done Christie yet (because so so many of them), but she had a couple of books that broke standard convention. (When one is one of the standards of the convention, can one break convention? I guess so.) The narrator is the murderer, or the deeply creepy And Then There Were None. Sayers also does this, a little; I think her percentage of suicides and accidents is higher than is really conventional.
Anyway, I got through nine of them (plus accidentally also listening to The Man In The Brown Suit, more of a thriller) before petering out, because I decided maybe it was time to do something else. Christie's puzzle box plots are the best of any of the ones listed here, but at a cost of character. The characters are certainly fun, but they're a bit like the characters Stephen King stocks the beginning of his horror books with - quirky and engaging, but usually not very deep, and also not very honest, in that the surface appearance need not have anything to do with the actual personality, if the plot requires it.
I might go back and listen to more, but dear God, she wrote eighty of these things, so I'm just going to post this now because otherwise it will be years.
Late Pile of Books
Oct. 14th, 2018 09:58 pmI haven't updated my reviews since May; I think I am going to post what I had the last time I wrote something down, rather than write down all the new books I've read. So this is rather belated, and we'll see how far caught up I can get quickly.
